Sen. Joni Ernst Lays Out Ideas for Major Government Cuts

And Senator Joni Ernst from Iowa chairs one and she's already made a slew of recommendations on where to cut funds. Do you know, can you tell us where is she looking? So it's interesting that she already kind of has a list. It's like she had this list sitting in her office and was just waiting for this moment because she came out on Fox and had a long list of areas that she already wants to cut. I'll just list a few of them for you. So one that was pretty interesting I found was that she said there are several buildings here in thousands of them that are mostly empty and they're wasting space on paying for rent in these locations but nobody's coming to work because there's not a requirement that requires federal workers to come in person to the office to work. So a lot of them are just being paid to sit there and waste in a sense. So her idea is to try to consolidate some of that space and then lease out the unused areas. That way they're not paying for the rent and then also the energy costs, which adds up to about $8 billion, she says, in rent and also $7 billion for energy. So that's a good chunk of money right there. But she also noted that she wants to audit the IRS employees because apparently some of them are flying under the radar and there's around $50 million, she says, that our employees haven't paid their taxes with. So she said that's an area that they can look at as well. But she also said that there's several areas within Biden's infrastructure law, specifically with electric vehicle charging stations. Apparently there's only been like 17 that have been built across the nation since that infrastructure law was signed by Biden. And they allocated like $7 billion or more to that effort. So she's hopeful to be able to pull back some of that money. But that will be an interesting area to look at as well, considering Elon Musk, of course, owns Tesla, an electric vehicle company. So it'll be interesting to see if he's willing to make cuts in those areas, especially in ones that could directly impact him and his company. Indeed, very interesting. Thank you so much, NTD's congressional correspondent Melina Weiskopf for filling us in.